Reading a commentary on the plite of the Palestinian people and finding Gaza described as a gulag, that formal style of systematic oppression brings to mind not only prison, concentration camps, and slave labour but the whole infrastructure of apartheid (which, you should know, means "seperate development").
I find myself wondering if it's time to develop my notion of globalization as moving towards towards the institutionalization of work-camps. (The many free-trade zones and maquiladoras that already exist are a first step in that direction. Likewise the special assembly factories created in some parts of East and South East Asia.) Only a small proportion of the managerial and technocratic elite would ever need to have actual contact with the inmates of these institutions and they would, in those situations, be easily described as agents of extension and guarantors of minimal rights. The end result, pretending that the biosphere could support the aberrantly excessive consumption of the insanely rich, would be hyper-polarization; the majority of human kind would be reduced to trolldom by the iron laws of competitive acquisition and intense accumulation.
Alienated from the basic sense of self-dignity that allows for a compassionate solidarity, the new aristocracy will have neither inclination for nor sense of nobless oblige. The most accomplished will live as though warring gods and the rest like sick junkies scrambling for their next fix. All of this off the wealth created by teeming billions.